akin toan anthropology of religion, Talal Asad (CUNY) grapples with some of the most important questions in domestic politics:

viz.

, if the “doctrine”of secularism that has governed public discourse in modern democracies restsupon Enlightenment principles that are rightly jettisoned, how should wereconfigure the space for religion in the public sphere? If secularism operates onthe basis of a flawed epistemological notion of autonomous, universal rationality,then is it even possible to have a “public” discourse? Would we be left with onlythe cacophony of tribalisms? Or is there a way of retaining secularity withoutsecularism?

2

Is it a matter of being post-secular, or rather post-secular

ist

?While Asad offers this as a coherent “book,” it is more properly a collection of somewhat related essays disguised as a monograph. Some essays, particularly inPart Two, bear only a tangential relationship to the topic—and that only afterAsad has added prefatory links to a previously published essay. However, thisdoes not downgrade the value of this collection; it only affects what to expectfrom it. The (previously unpublished) Introduction sketches Asad’s project,which he then organizes in three parts (which, to be honest, seem a bit arbitrary):

1

Talal Asad,

Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity

(Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2003), pp. 21-66. Subsequent references will be in parentheses in the text.

2

In this respect, I think

Formations of the Secular

is helpfully read alongside Jeffrey Stout’s importantcontribution,

Democracy and Tradition

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). While Stout isfocused on questions in American domestic policy, both Asad and Stout are engaging the sameissues. We would also find some overlap with someone like Graham Ward—a “new traditionalist”(according to Stout)—who, though he advocates “a return to tradition-based forms of reasoning,”does not endorse “outright condemnations of secularism or modernity or liberalism.” Rather, heconcedes that “in certain countries in the world a good dose of secularism would break therepressive holds certain state-ratified religions have over people’s lives.” See Graham Ward,

TrueReligion

(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), ix, 1.

O

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JCRT 6.3 (Fall 2005)

Secular (chapters 1-3), Secularism (chapters 4-6), and Secularization (chapter 7).The Introduction and chapter 1 sketch the more thematic issues and questions;chapters 2-5 are then loosely related case studies which try to concretize the“emergence” of secular modernity and thus investigate the secular indirectly.Chapter 6, on “Secularism, Nation-State, Religion” comes back to the heart of thematter, and then the book concludes with a long chapter that takes up Egypt inthe 19

th

and 20

th

centuries as a case study in secularization. The forays in chapters2-5, while interesting in their own right, tend to take us off the track of the title’spromised themes.The lexicon of this discussion—the “sacred,” the “secular,” “secularism,”“secularization,” even “religion”—is hotly contested, and Asad’s introductionand first chapter attempt to map this terrain and spell out at least a conventionfor employing these terms. We can most easily deal with—and dispense with—the “secularization thesis” à la Comte: “If anything is agreed upon, it is that astraightforward narrative progress from the religious to the secular is no longeracceptable” (1). However, this does not mean jettisoning the notions of thesecular or even secularism. Asad considers the former “an epistemic category”and the latter “a political doctrine.” According to a more traditional model asoutlined by Rawls or Charles Taylor, there is a close link between the two andtheir emergence alongside of (or as the condition of) the modern nation-state: thesecular denotes a mode of knowing which is neutral with respect to religiouscommitments or “visions of the good” and thus open and common to all. Thestate, emerging out of the conflict of religious wars, finds in the secular a kind of “lowest common denominator” and thus establishes “a political ethicindependent of religious convictions altogether” (2). Secular

ism

is the doctrinethat mandates that public discourse be conducted according to the neutral, non-religious standards of “secular” reason. So “‘the secular’ is conceptually prior tothe political doctrine of ‘secularism’” (16); epistemology precedes (perhaps evenentails) a distinct Enlightenment politics that continues to govern Europe.

3

It isonly on these terms that Muslims, for instance, can be European: working froman Enlightenment principle of disembodied abstraction, “Muslims, as membersof the abstract category ‘humans,’ can be assimilated or (as some recent theoristshave put it) ‘translated’ into a global (‘European’) civilization once they havedivested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential tothemselves” (169).

4

But it is just this reductionism that Asad wants to call into

3

I have argued for a similar axiom, though going one step further back, suggesting that a politics isrooted in an epistemology, which is in turn rooted in an ontology. See James K.A. Smith,

Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology

(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,2004), ch. 3 and

passim

. Asad hints at the same: “The question of how secularism as a politicaldoctrine is related to the secular as an ontology and an epistemology is evidently at stake here”(21).

4

This is now crystallized in discussions regarding Turkey’s admission to the EU.

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JCRT 6.3 (Fall 2005)

question, suggesting that there will be an inherent tension between secular,liberal democracies and the possibility of representing tradition-basedcommunities: “The ideology of political representation in liberal democraciesmakes it difficult if not impossible to represent Muslims as Muslims. Why?Because in theory the citizens who constitute a democratic state belong to a classthat is defined only by what is common to all its members and its members only”(173).

5

Thus Asad rejects not only the naïvete of the secularization thesis but also thiscommon liberal account of the connection between a secular epistemology and asecularist politics—not because he rejects secularism as a doctrine, but becausehe rejects the notion of a neutral epistemology assumed by the secular. So wemight say that Asad wants a secularism without the secular; that is, he is clearlyconcerned about the consequences of theocracy (particularly given his experiencein the Muslim world), and is thus a staunch defender of secularism and a certainde-theologization of political discourse and procedures. However, he (rightly)questions the notion of a neutral secular reason that has traditionallyundergirded secularism as a political doctrine.

6

Like William Connolly, he wantsto oppose the quasi-theocracy of the supposed neutrality of the secular reigningover and colonizing the space of public discourse; unlike Connolly, however,Asad will continue to advocate for secularism, but one understood, to useConnolly’s phrase, as a “decentered pluralism” (177).

7

But at this point I find a frustrating ambiguity in Asad’s constructive proposal.On the one hand, his secularism without the secular seems to proceed by a kindof remythologizing of the secular: an appreciation of the way that secularity is itsown confessional tradition that lives off faith in certain orienting “secular myths”(61). On the other hand, Asad clearly rejects the notion that the secular is

5

Another comparison with Stout is illuminating: insofar as Asad tends to equate secularity anddemocracy, and is critical of the exclusionary principles of secular democratic discourse,particularly vis-à-vis a religious community, his sensibilities here (especially concerning religious“minorities” [180]) are very close to those that Stout describes as “new traditionalists” (esp.Milbank and Hauerwas). Stout, on the other hand, does not believe that democracy is essentiallysecular.

6

Asad also rightly rejects the modern myth that secularism secures peace (6-8). As he wryly notes,“Experts on ‘Islam,’ ‘the modern world,’ and ‘political philosophy’ have lectured the Muslimworld yet again on its failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity and on its inability tobreak off from its violent roots. Now some reflection would show that violence does not

need

to bejustifyied by the Qur’an,” noting the massacres and violence perpetrated by Syria’s secularpresident Hafez al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, and Ariel Sharon (10). He makes the same point withrespect to cruelty and torture: “an equation of institutional religion with violence will not do”(100). In fact, torture could be seen as integral to the modern

secular

state (103-105).

7

In this same context Asad endorses John Milbank’s notion of “complex space” as “a fruitful way of thinking about the intersecting boundaries and heterogeneous activities of individuals as well asgroups related to traditions” (179).